Biden's Poland Performance

The hits just keep on coming. The most recent from President Brandon's visit to Poland was described as follows:

President Joe Biden was tragically felled by a slice of pizza topped with jalapeño peppers in Warsaw on Friday, Fox News contributor Charlie Hurt reported on Hannity.

. . . Biden . . . ate pizza with soldiers and afterward met with Polish President Andrezj Duda. As Biden spoke, he coughed and took a sip of his drink. He turned to Duda and said, “I was visiting our troops and I had pizza pie with hot peppers on it.”

. . . as b-roll of Biden eating pizza aired, Hurt said, “And there he is, defeated by a slice of jalapeño pizza.”

Biden is the first president to be “defeated” by food on foreign soil since George H.W. Bush threw up on the prime minister of Japan during a dinner in Tokyo in 1992.

That was the least of it. On Thursday, he insisted there was no reason to have imposed sanctions on Putin, or something like that:

President Biden suggested Thursday that sanctions were not meant to deter the actions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling reporters now that "sanctions never deter."

"Sir, deterrence didn’t work. What makes you think Vladimir Putin will alter course based on the action you’ve taken today," Biden was asked by CBS reporter Christina Ruffini during a press conference at a NATO summit in Brussels, Belgium.

"Let’s get something straight. You remember if you covered me from the very beginning, I did not say that, in fact, the sanctions would deter him. Sanctions never deter. You keep talking about that. Sanctions never deter," Biden responded.

Ruffini repeated the question, asking whether these actions could make Putin change course.

"That’s not what I said. You’re playing a game with me. The answer’s no," Biden snapped back.

. . . Biden's remarks come after weeks of messaging from key Biden administration officials – including Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken – who claimed the sanctions placed on Russia were meant to deter the actions of Putin.

But this is completely consistent with the position he took a month ago, when immediately after Putin's invasion of Ukraine, he said “no one expected sanctions would prevent anything”, again to the amazement of the press:

CBS News' Margaret Brennan: "I thought that was so interesting when President Biden said, 'No one expected sanctions to prevent anything.'

"Actually, that's exactly what his foreign policy team said again and again, and it's what his secretary of state said to me on Sunday."

He was called out for "inconsistency" then, but as far as I can see, he's been completely consistent. As I said then, he really believes he's a skilled Machiavellian manipulator, operating in a behind-the-scenes dimension of Realpolitik beyond conventional expectations. It's plain he regarded sanctions as kabuki from the get-go, an empty threat made for the benefit of the ignorant public, and I think the subtext as well was that he was going to avoid World War III by letting Putin roll into Ukraine, and the whole thing would be over within a matter of days anyhow.

The gaffe during his pep talk to the 82nd Airborne was of a piece:

“You’re going to see when you’re there, and some of you have been there, you’re gonna see — you’re gonna see women, young people standing in the middle in front of a damned tank just saying, ‘I’m not leaving, I’m holding my ground,’” Biden said.

A White House official quickly clarified that Biden wasn’t changing his stance on deploying the military into Ukraine.

“The president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position,” a Biden spokesman told The Post.

There's nothing new here; this isn't an issue of cognitive decline. Biden is aware of his surroundings; he isn't talking to people who aren't there; he's speaking as coherently as any dumb guy can. In fact, he was just running his mouth like any jerk in the corner bar. It's just that you can't take anything he says seriously, and in fact, he gets impatient with people who expect him to be serious.